Daily Dothttp://www.dailydot.com/Daily Dot Articleen-usFri, 02 Nov 2012 15:50:38 +0000The new planking? Chinese tear up photos of Maohttp://www.dailydot.com/news/chinese-tear-photos-yao-meme/<p><img src='//cdn0.dailydot.com/cache/fc/84/fc848c07361c8c7fe14af2efea6b782f.jpg'></p><p>
In America, jumping on the meme bandwagon takes about as much courage as putting on socks in the morning. In China, the stakes are just a tad higher. Especially when the latest meme involves taking pictures of yourself ripping apart images of Mao Zedong.</p>
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Case in point: The four young men who started the Mao-ripping meme have already received death threats&mdash;not just against themselves, but their entire families.</p>
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It all started as a protest against autocracy. The men&mdash;Lin Qilei, Ji Laisong, Cao Xiaodong, and Wen Li&mdash;had read a <a href="http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/740070.shtml">story</a> about a Chinese woman in Cambodia who&rsquo;d been put in prison for tearing up a photograph of that country&rsquo;s late king. So the four men, who live in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of the Eastern province of Henan, grabbed some portraits of Mao.</p>
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Then they asked their friend to snap a picture as they ripped the images to shreds.</p>
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&ldquo;Leftist&rdquo; Chinese Mao fans were not pleased, it&rsquo;s safe to say. That picture quickly spread on places like Sina Weibo, the wildly popular Chinese <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/human-flesh-search-engine">microblogging service, and it didn&rsquo;t take long for China&rsquo;s so-called</a> &ldquo;human flesh search engine&rdquo; to pin down their real identities. Their phone numbers were posted. They received threatening comments and phone calls.</p>
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Some paranoid netizens even chalked up the photograph as some kind of nefarious plot orchestrated by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. (&ldquo;It had nothing to do with Ai Weiwei,&rdquo; Cao told a Hong Kong news site. &ldquo;It was just something I thought up, and then everyone went and did it.&rdquo;)</p>
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Well, at least the four Zhengzhou men aren&rsquo;t alone. While they&rsquo;re taking heat from Maoists, they have allies online. Chinese netizens have turned ripping up Mao portraits into quite the viral sensation, just in time for the country&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/news/political-internet-clampdown-beijing/">once-in-a-decade leadership transition</a>.</p>
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Twitter user <a href="http://twitter.com/hexiefarm">@hexiefarm</a> has been compiling the images over the past day. Below, we&rsquo;ve posted our favorites.</p>
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<script src="http://storify.com/dailydot/ripping-up-mao-becomes-a-thing-in-china.js"></script><noscript>[<a href="http://storify.com/dailydot/ripping-up-mao-becomes-a-thing-in-china" target="_blank">View the story "Ripping up Mao portraits" on Storify</a>]</noscript></p>
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<em>Photo via <a href="http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/sy2-10302012091807.html">RFA</a></em></p>
kevin@dailydot.com (Kevin Morris)Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:50:38 +0000http://www.dailydot.com/news/chinese-tear-photos-yao-meme/NewsPolitics